Legacy video surveillance systems that use videocassette recorders (VCRs) require tremendous amounts of effort and time to review specific incidents in recorded video footage. For example, let’s consider a situation when someone reports a laptop computer missing after a 4-day holiday weekend. Before smart search was developed, operators began reviewing video from the beginning of the long weekend and had to fast forward through the footage until they found the date and time when something happened to the laptop. Fast forwarding through 4 days of video is an extremely time consuming process and is very inefficient.
Early generation digital video recorders (DVRs) that didn’t include smart search capabilities sped up the traditional video review process, but were no comparison to those with smart search. In the example above, early generation DVRs would save significant time by allowing the operator to jump forward in time with mouse clicks rather than fast forwarding through seemingly endless video to find an incident. The operator jumps forward in time until the laptop is no longer seen in the video and then begins back tracking and narrowing the time margins until the time the laptop moved is identified. This was a tremendous advantage to operators, but still required significant time and attention in comparison to systems that have smart search.
Advanced DVRs and network video recorders (NVRs) then came to the market with several video analytic features including smart search. These systems are much more efficient with situations like the above laptop example. With smart search, an operator simply goes back to a date and time when the laptop was present, clicks smart search, and then drags a box around the laptop. The system then automatically advances to the date and time when that object moved. The process of finding the date and time goes from hours to a few seconds with smart search functionality.
Smart search functionality is critical to ensuring efficient surveillance operator process. It saves time and resources. Smart search is great for everyone because it facilitates tasks that were traditionally very labor intensive and gets important information to the requesting parties much faster.
We look forward to sharing additional security insights with you next Wednesday here at The O.
